You would have to be an addict of this blog with a spectacularly good memory to recall the tiny part that this blog played in a victory to save parts of the Norfolk Broads which have high levels of protection under EU wildlife laws from being damaged by water abstraction. The last blog here on…
Author: Mark
Born Bristol, UK
Educated: Cleeve House School Bristol, Bristol Grammar School and Downing College Cambridge
Ph.D. University of Aberdeen, Winter activity of pipistrelle bats.
NERC post-doctoral Research Fellow, Edward Grey Institute, Oxford University
Former Conservation Director of the RSPB, 1989-2011
Naturally cultured?
I’m a Radio 4 devotee – maybe even an addict. I need my fix of BBC Radio 4 every day and I almost always get it. I’m usually awake long before Farming Today but tend to be having my most productive part of the day while the annoying farming programme is broadcast so I try…
Paul Leyland – Early Thorn Moth
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Paul writes: the Early Thorn (Selania dentaria) is one of the commonest moths flying at the moment. I usually see them from mid March to the end of April, they have two broods so will appear again in the middle of July. I found this one a couple of weeks ago in my North Yorkshire…
Sunday book review – Rocky Shores by John Archer-Thomson and Julian Cremona
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This is a lovely book and makes me wish that my adopted county of Northamptonshire had some coastline, and rocky shores at that, to which I could rush to explore some rockpools with my newly gained knowledge. The Bloomsbury Wildlife series might possibly be seen as a competing series of books to the Collins New…
Tim Melling – Plain Laughingthrush
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Tim writes: superficially this looks like a Blackbird, but when you look closely you see the beak and tail are too long. This is a Plain Laughingthrush (Garrulax davidi), which is only found in the mountains of China (1600-3500m) and is not particularly common in the limited range where it does occur. Moreover, like other…
Ralph Underhill – Saturday cartoon
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Another, new-ish, paper on the impacts of lead ammunition
This paper came out in the autumn, Lead content in wild game shot with lead or non-lead ammunition – Does “state of the art consumer health protection” require non-lead ammunition? Here is the abstract, the highlighted words were my choice of highlight, The toxicity of lead has been known for a long time, and no…
You don’t see this very often…
I went back to check on a paper on heather burning which was published a few years ago and found that something had been added to it. 10 January 2019In the version of this Article originally published, the authors neglected to include information on Competing Interests; this has now been included in all versions of…
Getting close
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The crowdfunder by The Seahorse Trust (see Guest blog here) has passed £10,000 and is heading towards its target of £12,000 with 8 days to go to raise the balance. I wish them success!
A new paper on lead impacts
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This paper is interesting, Wildlife, human and environmental costs of using lead ammunition: An economic review and analysis Here is the abstract, with my choice of highlighted words, A proposed European Union (EU)-wide restriction on the use of lead gunshot for shooting in and over wetlands estimated that the societal benefits of a restriction outweighed…